Archive for January, 2009

There’s something refreshing about Court Theatre’s approach to the preview process. At Court, there are not just a couple of previews, but a whole week of them: seven performances total. And every night, following the performance, there is a post-show discussion between audience and artistic staff (usually led by me and director Charlie Newell). The thing that’s really exciting is that not only does Court actively solicit the opinions of audience members, but that things drastically and entirely change within the course of previews, often based on those shared comments.

Last night, after Sunday evening’s performance of The Wild Duck and the subsequent production meeting, the artistic team convened to discuss the production. We talked about what was working, what wasn’t, what questions we have, what we love, what we don’t, and the last half hour of the conversation was devoted to a possible huge re-writing and re-staging of the final scene of the play. Richard Nelson, who wrote the new translation/adaptation of Ibsen’s play expressly for a début at the Court, spent the weekend with us to see the production and discuss the process, and suddenly in our meeting, he began discussing the tricky last scene, and pulled out his script and drew sweeping arrows, made slashes through dialogue, and scribbled new words in the margins. We don’t know yet if this will indeed become the final five minutes of the production, but Charlie is excited to try it and see what happens.

Today was our first day off in a week, and tomorrow (after the inauguration) we are back in the theatre at the MCA to explore new ideas, incarnations, and experiments. Characters are still evolving and growing, the set and lights and clothes continue to change. We still have questions, and, five days before opening, we still have time to explore—which is a good place to be.

Essay written for the production by Kimberly Kenny, Senior Lecturer in Norwegian at the University of Chicago.

The Wild Duck, the fifth in his prose play cycle of twelve, introduced a new phase in Ibsen’s drama. The first of Ibsen’s psychological plays, it followed Enemy of the People, which concluded the so-called social plays. Ibsen himself noted the singularity of this drama, saying that “it occupied a place of its own” and that its method was “in many respects a departure.” Still, The Wild Duck was hardly Ibsen’s first foray into innovation. In A Dollhouse, he set the theatrical world on its ear when he subverted the concept of the well-made play, denying the expected resolution of conflict and, instead, had Nora slam the door on her way out. His subsequent offering, Ghosts, ruthlessly depicted a corrupted family and a hypocritical clergy; while Enemy of the People, a quasi-comedy, provided a protagonist who characterized his fellow men as ill-bred mongrels. Repeatedly, Ibsen sought to challenge his audiences both in terms of form and content. Yet even in this larger context of provocation, Ibsen insisted on the newness of The Wild Duck, “I think that The Wild Duck may possibly lure some of our dramatists down new paths, which I would consider desirable.” What did Ibsen mean by “new paths”? Clearly, he meant a new mode, a new type of drama, one that resisted the labels of comedy or tragedy; and, certainly, there are both tragic and comic elements in the play, but what is the effect of this combination? The poignancy of the tragedy derives immeasurable power from the use of comedy, while the sharp contrast between light humor and terrible distress contribute to the pathos of the final climax.

Still, Ibsen meant more by “new paths” than this blending of tragedy and comedy. Already in Enemy of the People, he had signaled philosophical changes, revealing an increasingly contemptuous attitude toward humanity. In The Wild Duck, Ibsen shifts focus to the individual soul and a new type of psychological interaction. The central event is not, as was previously, the revelation of past sins or secrets, although there are, of course, secrets. Rather, it is the way in which Gregers bonds with Hedvig and asserts control over her mind that provides the basis for drama. Utilizing the wild duck as his verbal instrument, as symbol, he promotes her equation of herself with the wild duck. Her sacrifice is the predictable substitution of one quantity for another. Hedvig and Gregers connect via one old-fashioned, poetic phrase, “in the depths of the sea.” (på havsens bund). Here, as with the wild duck, Gregers relies on verbal magic to establish a bond with Hedvig, who is vulnerable, caught between childhood and adulthood, between literal and symbolic meaning.

Indeed, symbolism nearly overwhelms the play, asserting itself as the most significant difference in Ibsen’s dramatic technique. It is hardly new for Ibsen to choose a title of symbolic weight—A Dollhouse or Ghosts, for example–but the wild duck, proves to be a remarkably plastic symbol, lending itself to any number of equations. In terms of a broad category, the wounded duck gathers together all of the defeated dreams of the household. In addition, the tale of the wild duck corresponds neatly with Gregers’s mission to bring the Ekdal family up from the mire, just as Old Werle’s dog retrieved the wounded wild duck. Potential symbolic value for the wild duck does not end there. Perhaps it represents the enfeebled state of the modern imagination. Consider the potential pun—vildand (wild duck) versus vild aand (wild spirit). In fact, some have argued that the wild duck is so potent a symbol that it forces the action of the drama away from the realism of Ghosts and in a new direction. Earlier, symbols had served as points of reference or to underscore a central theme, now Ibsen extends his metaphoric structure, allowing it to pervade the stage sets and the scenery.

Ibsen acknowledged these tactics, referring to them as “galskap” (crazy tricks). Consider the looming symbol, which is the Ekdals’ home. Ibsen’s stage directions situate them in “a loft… with great panes of glass.” The changing light corresponds to the various moods of each act. Below them are found Relling and Molvik, who are occupied with drinking, etc. (Hjalmer will at one point descend to their level.) The Ekdals’ living space is divided between the photography studio in the foreground and the attic, the “natural refuge,” behind. Furthermore, the symbolic value of the home’s occupants demands attention; the paradigm is Christian. Gregers, like Dr. Stockman before him, is a strongly parodic, Messianic character, and, like Stockman, an unsuccessful truth-bringer. If Gregers is the apparent Messiah, then Old Werle is the supreme power in the world of the play. A mysterious figure, operating in the shadows, Werle rules both the lower world of the Ekdals and the world of Høidal (high valley), the higher world, from which his son descends to raise up the Ekdals. But where is the Holy Spirit? Could Hedvig in the form of her double, the wild duck, fill this role? Finally, rounding out the party and serving as counterpart to Gregers, we find the Dr. Relling, the satanic figure of deception and purveyor of the “livsløgn” (life-lie), who operates in tandem with the priest-candidate, Molvik.

Eventually, however, we have to set aside Gregers and Relling, and ponder the real struggle, between the ideal of truth and the usefulness of the life-lie. No longer on a “new path,” we find ourselves in familiar Ibsen territory, reminiscent of the closing scenes in A Dollhouse and Ghosts, grappling with questions which defy resolution.

RN: Immediately what brought me to The Wild Duck was Charlie. Charlie asked me if I would do a new version of the play and I agreed.

There is a longer, more involved story about what brought me to Ibsen and how Ibsen now figures very importantly in my own career as a playwright. That has come about by my trying to find a way, as a playwright, to articulate the world as I see it and the society as I see it; and trying to find that glue that holds the pieces of a play together, that determines what stories one’s writing and what one’s leaving out. And that immediately asks questions of what holds a society together. What holds a play together and what holds a society together are often in a strong relationship.

For example, in the twentieth century there’s a lot of large-scale societal plays that were held together by an ideological thrust. That ideological thrust has been proven to be bogus, and so now in the 21st century we’re looking for other ways to hold things together. And my route to Ibsen has been through that question, where I learned first working on a translation of An Enemy of the People and now on Wild Duck that Ibsen has held the answer for me in how to move forward. That at the very center of these seemingly large-scale societal plays, they’re plays about family — and the complexities and the confusions of familial relations really reflect the complexities and confusions of a society at large. And once I grasped that idea at work in Ibsen, that seemed to be an opening for me as a playwright to find ways of talking about the world as I see it.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROCESS IN TRANSLATING AND ADAPTING A PLAY.

RN: I’ve been a strong proponent of having playwrights translate and adapt classic plays. Even when, as in this case, the playwright doesn’t know the original language. I don’t know any Norwegian. I worked off of 3 contemporaneous translations from the late 19th and early 20th centuries which functioned for me as literal translations. Obviously the best possibility would be a playwright who knew the language–but there aren’t that many in America who know Norwegian.

For me the goal of a translation is to convey the intention of the playwright, as opposed to, necessarily, the exact words. The reason for that is, it’s very different from translating a novel, it’s more similar to translating a poem. In a poem, you as the translator are making choices about what’s important — is it the alliteration, the meaning, is it the rhyme, is it the meter — because in a translation you’re not going to keep all of those things. You’re not going to find the same kind of expression that the original poet found. So you have to make choices and figure out what is important to convey. And the same is very much true of a play. I was talking to the actors earlier today about a play by Nicolai Erdman, The Suicide, a play written in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. It’s a farce, a very funny play, very political, in which there’s a 4 page section where various things happen to the main character — something falls down, something gets picked up, something gets put on his head — until finally all of these odd things that seem to make no sense come together and this character arrives at the pose of a very famous photo of Stalin. In the 1930s in the Soviet Union that would have been a very radical, thrilling, dangerous thing to do. In 2008 America that doesn’t make any sense. No one knows that photograph. Therefore, to translate the words to an audience that’s not going to get the result, that’s not translating. That’s transcribing. If you can’t convey the exact intention you try to convey something as close to it as you possibly can. Therefore when I translated that I wrote my own political joke through that, rewrote the entire 4 pages into something else, but something that I think reflected the intent of the author more than just transcribing his words. So the job of a play translator is to find and to convey the intention of the playwright.

Now, the language of the theater is character, it’s not words, that is how a playwright is trained — we think in terms of character and point of view. On stage at any one time there’s 3 or 5 or 6 people — that’s 3 or 5 or 6 points of view colliding at once. That’s the dynamic that a playwright functions in. That’s not the dynamic that a translator functions in, which is often much a more singular point of view. So playwrights have an ability, a skill, a perspective that is necessary in conveying and translating classical plays.

DO YOU THINK THE WILD DUCK IS A TRAGEDY?

RN: I don’t think The Wild Duck is a tragedy at all unless you consider Waiting For Godot a tragedy. It’s in this no-man’s-land: a play that doesn’t resolve itself. A tragedy requires a different journey. There are tragic elements of the play without doubt, just as there are very comic elements. But at the end of the day, Ibsen isn’t saying, “Learn from this,” he’s saying, “This is us.” That’s a very different journey than a tragedy.

WHAT’S BEEN THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS BETWEEN THE TWO OF YOU?

RN: Charlie’s been fantastic. I did a draft of The Wild Duck, first a draft for myself in pencil on legal pads, then I cleaned that up, sent it to Charlie, and Charlie has given me hundreds of notes, always very specific. “Should there be something else, what does that mean, is that necessary…” It was a very good way of getting into a dialogue about the play that was tethered to specific lines and moments.

CN: It’s been such a thrill for me to work with a living playwright, on a piece that I have such a history with, because one of the principal reasons for asking Richard to do this translation/adaptation was to have a strong, new point of view about the play. Richard has consistently provided eye-opening and — for me personally — really shattering ways to think about the play. I have learned so much, not just about the play but also about what it means to be a translator, what it means to be a playwright. I feel very lucky that he wanted to listen to anything I had to say, much less to get into such a detailed and specific discussion.

The intent of the entire production is, how can we bring The Wild Duck to a contemporary audience in ways that many people may say “Wow, I never thought Ibsen could be that.” There might be many ways of describing what “that” is, depending on the audience, depending on the experience, but I’m very optimistic about that opportunity for the show.

CHARLIE, WHAT IS YOUR HISTORY WITH THIS PLAY?

CN: When I was an early career director, I had the opportunity to apprentice with the Romanian director Lucian Pintilie. I assisted him on productions of this play in Washington, DC and Minneapolis. My genetic identity as a director was transformed by that experience. It was his ability to bring a fiercely intellectual rigor to the examination of the play while basing it deeply in a complicated emotional understanding of these characters. And the combination of those things set me on a journey I’ve been on ever since. My fear was, if I ever took on The Wild Duck again all I would want to do is what Lucian had done, because it was such a transformational experience for me. It’s now 23 years later, and I began to think about what work we could take to the MCA. That room was the first inspiration. But it was really a conversation with Richard about the new Barbara Franke commissioning program: “What might you be interesting in translating? What about Ibsen?”

For me the most important part is that now I can bring all that history and experience, but through Richard’s unique and powerful point of view, through a unique and incredible group of actors, we are not even going to attempt to do something from the past, but to take Ibsen to the next place. That is the definition of how I think of myself as an artist: How can I challenge myself to what’s next?

TELL US ABOUT THE COMMISSIONING PROGRAM.

RN: I think what’s most exciting is that it’s a living playwright working with a classic play. It’s a two-way street. Right now we’re watching a one-way street, where whatever skills I have I’m putting into The Wild Duck to make it accessible, meaningful to 2009. But what’s isn’t seen is that there’s another route back, how The Wild Duck affects me as a playwright, gives me opportunities to learn my craft. To spend months with Henrik Ibsen in his mind, trying to understand his intentions –second-by-second, moment-to-moment — it’s a way of growing as a playwright. You cannot but grow as a playwright.